"Christ, in restoring the
rotting body of his friend to life, shows an example both of his
mighty power, and also of his singular good will toward men: and
this is also an image of the resurrection to come."

"A true Christian, when he
dies, does but sleep; he rests from the labours of the past day.
Nay, herein death is better than sleep, that sleep is only a short
rest, but death is the end of earthly cares and toils."

"Says BENGEL beautifully,
"Sleep is the death of the saints, in the language of heaven;
but this language the disciples here understood not; incomparable is
the generosity of the divine manner of discoursing, but such is the
slowness of men's apprehension that Scripture often has to descend
to the more miserable style of human discourse."

"Christ makes the grand,
striking declaration that he is the RESURRECTION AND
THE LIFE, words that never could have
fallen from the lips of a sane mortal. They mean that he is the
power which opens every grave, gives life to the sleepers, and calls
them forth to a new existence; that the life that endows men with
eternal being is in him and proceeds from him. In the light of his
own resurrection they mean that when he burst open the tomb he did
it for humanity and in him humanity has won the victory over
death."

"Jesus knows that Lazarus is dead.Â He tells his disciples this brutal truth.Â Only then does he decide to go to nearby Bethany. He arrives on the fourth day.Â The day that is beyond all hope.Â All through Scripture the third day is the day that God acts.Â Jesus arrives on the hopeless day, the fourth."

"It is quite possible that Mary and
Martha, as single women, were dependent upon Lazarus. His death would be
more than just the loss of a brother, but of their means of living (Malina
& Rohrbaugh, p. 195)."

"If you had the capacity to give life to someone, to enable them to live more fully, more vibrantly, more meaningfully – to discover what it means to be truly alive – would you do it, if you doing so would cost you your own life?"

"The epiphany is that we are to see ourselves in Lazarus and see the miracle of his restoration of physical life as the beginning of our entry into eternal life that begins the moment we accept Jesus' offer of relationship with us."

Holy
Textures, Understanding the Bible in its own time and in ours, John 11:1-45, David Ewart, 2011.

"This story about Lazarus shares much in common with that of the Samaritan woman at the well. With the Samaritan woman the issue was seeing Jesus as the source of living water as compared to ordinary water. Here the issue is to see Jesus as the source of living life as compared to ordinary life."

"The point of the saying, and
ultimately of the narrative as a whole, is to make and celebrate the claim
that people who believe in Jesus find life. It is eternal life, which
includes timelessness or eternity in the temporal sense, but the focus is
quality not quantity. It is sharing the life of God here and now and
forever."

"Part of Christian maturity involves learning to wait. We ought to
be confident not so much about our chances for a rosy outcome, or
about exactly where, when and how God will act, but confident that
He will act."

Holy Textures, Understanding the Bible in its own time and in ours,
John 11:32-44, David Ewart, 2009.

"If the authors of
the Lectionary had allowed us to read a few verses more, we would
discover that for some of the Jerusalem crowd, restoring Lazarus to
life was the final straw that convinced the religious elite that
Jesus was too dangerous to continuing living."

"If God is God at all, He is
God of all. It is impossible for God to be God and not to be
responsible (ultimately) for all that occurs. By this I do not mean
to say that God is the source of all evil, but that God is
responsible for including the existence of evil, tragedy, and
suffering in His plan."

"Once we start to pull back the veil, we notice numerous instances
of hiding-revealing, secrecy, ambiguity and even lying. The following is an attempt to
catalogue the primary and related instances of secrecy and "information control"
in the document."